


A Coin Trick

by GloriaMundi



Category: American Gods - Gaiman
Genre: F/M, Gift Fic, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-01-01
Updated: 2005-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-05 18:53:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/44988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GloriaMundi/pseuds/GloriaMundi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All America, all the world, should be Shadow's bride.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Coin Trick

**Author's Note:**

  * For [genarti](https://archiveofourown.org/users/genarti/gifts).



All of America, all of the world, should have been Shadow's bride. He'd come through light and darkness, life and death, for it. He'd brought spring early to the heart, the _hearts_, of America. The world was his bride.

Oh, there were women: slim, fair, blue-veined Magga in Helsinki, comfortably curvaceous Deirdre in Dublin, dark and angular Genevieve in Paris. Perhaps their attraction to him was part of Easter's resurrection-magic: perhaps some grateful gift of the Gallows-lord (the old one himself, not the now-ghost who'd fathered Shadow) at their looked-for meeting on the hillside above Reykjavik. Whatever the trick of it, Shadow did not complain. He had stopped saying 'no' simply for the sake of it, stopped judging them all against some blue-eyed (blue-skinned) memory with her long chestnut hair and her brilliant (ghastly) smile. There were women, now, to whom Shadow said 'yes': or, tongue-tied by ignorance of the most basic words, simply smiled and nodded and followed.

But none of the women were Laura.

Shadow had loved others, before her: even (he was beginning to realise, with something akin to regret) since her. Sometimes he dreamt of Zorya Polunochnaya's sweet sad smile, and the kiss she'd blessed him with. Sometimes, when he had been in the same place for too long, he dreamt of dark amber eyes and tingling scratches on his back, soft lips and a rough tongue, sand dunes and desert winds. A day after that, or two days, he'd be on the road again, staring out at tame European forests, or down at heaped white clouds, or over long changeless waves as grey and relentless as steel.

* * *

"You're running away, ain't you?" said Luce, who he met in the Egyptian Room at the British Museum. It was about the third thing she said to him, over a beer in a warm, smoky pub across the road. The first words he'd heard her speak had been, "Never mind the mummies, the really cool stuff's through here." Next, as Shadow ran a hand over age-smoothed stone feathers, she'd remarked, "I saw Horus once."

"I've seen him, too," Shadow had replied, unthinking, and then realised what he had said. When he'd looked at the girl -- still 'the girl', for she hadn't introduced herself -- she hadn't looked like a nut, or a New Age type, or a madwoman. She was tall, and skinny, and she wore so many silver earrings that her ear looked like a spiral-bound notebook. Her hair was red, except where it was black or bleached blonde.

"I'm Luce," she'd said, grinning at him as though neither of them had said anything out of the ordinary. "Fancy a drink?"

One drink turned into several, and somewhere along the line Shadow found himself telling Luce about Laura, and then about his father -- oh, not _everything_ about his father, but about the way his mother had never really talked about him, and about how Shadow had met him and learned of his heritage. But when he heard himself beginning to speak of the world-tree, he bit back the words.

"What's wrong?"

"I don't want to talk about that. About him." "Old money, eh?" Luce nodded, eyes fixed like a hawk's on Shadow's own. "You an' me both. So, tell me about Horus, eh?"

Shadow had intended to laugh it off, or recount it all as a dream, but suddenly his mind was full of hawk-Horus, man-Horus, and the lights around the bar seemed to dazzle like spring sunshine.

"I was dead," he said slowly, "and he brought me back -- no. I was cold, and he warmed me." He took a deep draught of his beer, and imagined grain and river-water and hops. "Everyone told me he was mad."

Luce stared at him, _through_ him, and then nodded as though something in his face (under his face) had confirmed his words.

"I was in Cornwall," she said. "Down in the West Country, for the eclipse back in '99. Everyone was down that way, camping on the beach, playing music, dancing: one big free festival, see?"

"Yeah," said Shadow, feeling immeasurably old.

"Well, weather weren't too good on the day, typical British summer! An' we all thought we wouldn't see a thing, though it went awful dark an' cold that morning. We were cooking up a barbie for breakfast on the beach, and there was this foreign bloke -- well, I didn't know he was foreign: could've been from anywhere, really. Dark and skinny. Just hanging around, like he could smell the bacon cooking and hadn't eaten for days."

Eats roadkill, remembered Shadow.

"And my mate Gwen got him to come over, and gave him breakfast: and she said what a shame it was, not to see the sun being eaten up -- y'know, like in the Egyptian myth?"

Shadow could see it all: the giant serpent battling the Falcon of the Morning, the light swallowed and yet shining, the sun resurrected. He could see it as clearly, in his mind, as though he had seen it in truth. "It's a story," he said anyway.

"They're _all_ stories," said Luce scornfully. "Don't make 'em less real. So anyway, this bloke: he gave Gwen this fierce look, like she'd offended him."

Shadow remembered that look, though he did not think that Luce had seen the Horus who'd perched on the world-tree with him. _That_ Horus had been mad, but Shadow did not think he was mad any more. Easter would do that to you.

"By then," Luce was saying, leaning forward over the table towards him, gesturing with her bitten-nailed hand, "it was really dark, and we had the candles lit, and, no word of a lie, his eyes were practically glowing. He stood up, and we thought he was goin' somewhere, but he just started staring at the clouds, staring really hard. And then, you'll never --"

"The clouds parted," said Shadow. "And you saw the sun."

Luce wrinkled her nose at him. "You _have_ seen him," she said sulkily. "You know."

Shadow stared at her helplessly, and thought of skin that was not pale and acne-scarred, but dark and shiny with sweat: of hair that was not straight and red-blond-black, but curly and blue-black: of the hawk's eye, looking back at him. "Eats roadkill," said Mr Jacquel's deep voice in his head. Horus had brought Shadow a raw, warm baby rabbit, there on the tree. Shadow found his mouth watering at the memory, though he had eaten none of it.

"Would you like to have dinner?" he said.

"I'd like that," said Luce, smiling at him: but her smile did not light up their little corner of the pub.

* * *

After dinner (it had been pizza), in Luce's book-strewn bed, Shadow found himself thinking of someone else. He was with Luce, _with_ her in the most incontestable of ways. She engaged all his senses, with her soft skin and bony hips, the perfume she wore and the sweet sourness of her, the cries and murmurs and giggles that issued from her beer-stale, spice-sharp mouth, the warm glow of her skin against sheets that Shadow thought might be grey. He was not thinking of Laura at all: but still, when the sun burst behind his closed eyes, it was not Luce he saw in the afterimage.

"You don't really like women, do you?" she said, afterwards. "No, no, I know you enjoyed that. And you were great, you really were. Honest. But you remind me of this gay guy I went to bed with, just the --"

"I'm not gay," said Shadow. "I've never had sex with a man." Thinking back to prison, and how easily it might have been otherwise: but he was big, and he worked out, and they left him alone.

"Well," said Luce, snuggling against him, "maybe you should, eh?"

Later, in the grey light of the London dawn, Shadow washed in cold water. The mirror above the basin was painted with translucent paints, ferns and flowers and "Day One of the FUTURE!" on a red banner across the top of it. Shadow had to stoop to see his face.

"Time to go back," he told himself, and he nodded.

"Things wait for you there," the Gallows-lord had told him. "But they will wait until you return."

Shadow was naked, and his jeans were in the bedroom: he didn't want to wake Luce, who was snoring gently into the single pillow. He pulled a gold coin out of the air, and tossed it. "Heads Cairo," he said to his reflection, pronouncing it Kay-ro. "Tails ... tails Lakeside." He'd drop in on Chad and Marguerite, and --

The coin came down heads, though the head was not a human head. Shadow looked at it, and turned it over, and laughed aloud at himself. He left it there on the bathroom shelf, among the glittery bath-bombs and the air plants and the colourful sponges shaped like animals. Later, Luce would find it there, and wonder where it had come from: would turn it over and over in her hands, examining the hawk-profile on one face, the dog's-head on the other. "Egyptian," they told her, in the shop across from the museum. "A funeral token. If you're selling --"

But Luce (though she did not remember why, or where, or from whom she had acquired it) wasn't selling.

She left the coin to her son.

-end-

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Yuletide 2004


End file.
